A Response from Mark Uhran, NASA International Space Station Director (retired)

This new "Ecomodernist Manifesto" offers the potential to achieve a turning point in the global dialogue on the tension between human growth and environmental preservation. For the first time, a mature and reasoned perspective offers a truly sustainable pathway that can achieve both growth and preservation without resorting to impractical solutions and unfounded claims. Both human economic growth, the key to eradicating poverty and hunger, and environmental protection can, and indeed must, go forward together. The first cannot be constrained, because it originates in the most fundamental of human needs –– survival without suffering, while the latter will forever remain essential to continued human existence.

The manifesto’s declaration that, “Absent profound technological change there is no credible path to meaningful climate mitigation” is a clarion call capable of converging global efforts to achieve the needed change. The recognition that solar photovoltaic, advanced uranium fission, and future hydrogen fusion technologies are all within the grasp of reality should reside at the nexus of the energy-climate debate. And, this debate may well be the defining issue of the 21st century.

Thank you to the authors of the Ecomodernist Manifesto for this critical initiative. These technologies are all achievable within our generation, but our political leaders must choose to pursue them with steadfast and encourage each technology to thrive. In fact, nations representing over the half of the world population are already partnered cooperatively to demonstrate clean, safe, carbon-free, and virtually unlimited hydrogen fusion as a future energy source.